Once I had the blade in its final shape, and etched, I stopped sending images of what it looked like to its future owner. Opening a box with a new knife in it should be a surprise, and a small voyage of discovery. It’s especially a surprise if the person didn’t expect a knife and jams their hand into the box to see what’s inside; my sister finally forgave me for sending her an unexpected paring knife many moons ago.

Please give me feedback if these are getting boring for you, and I can stop and spend my time complaining about the F-35, instead. I’m going to do a series of postings about a knife I recently delivered into the hands of its new person, which I am quite proud of.

In a recent posting, I described a situation involving a few pounds of epoxy and a steel pressure can. [stderr] Commentariat(tm) agent MattP (must mock his crappy brain) suggested a cross-bar and a threaded rod, and I liked that idea.

I may have mentioned before that it’s really hard to drill a hole through composite steel, since (sometimes) the metal hardens from the heat of drilling through the layers. Thus, you get a ways into the piece and think “this is going well” and suddenly all activity ceases until you re-anneal the work.

I haven’t been doing a lot of photos, so I don’t have a photographic narrative of what Q’s been up to. That’s because it’s pretty much the same as every other step of the process, which you’ve already been exposed to. Part of me is thinking there must be a limit to how interesting any number of blobby-looking pieces of glowing red steel can be.